Daily Archives: March 29, 2022

Tue Nov 10, 2020 - 7:07 pm ESTFri Jun 18, 2021 - 5:25 pm EDT

November 10, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) The COVID-19 pandemic was manufactured by the worlds elites as part of a plan to globally advance transhumanism literally, the fusion of human beings with technology in an attempt to alter human nature itself and create a superhuman being and an earthly paradise, according to a Peruvian academic and expert in technology.

This dystopian nightmare scenario is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but an integral part of the proposed post-pandemic Great Reset, Dr. Miklos Lukacs de Pereny said at a recent summit on COVID-19.

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Indeed, to the extent that implementing the transhumanist agenda is possible, it requires the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a global elite and the dependence of people on the state, said Lukacs.

Thats precisely the aim of the Great Reset, promoted by German economist Klaus Schwab, CEO and founder of World Economic Forum, along with billionaire philanthropists George Soros and Bill Gates and other owners, managers, and shareholders of Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Finance who meet at the WEF retreats at Davos, Switzerland, contended Lukacs.

Transhumanism is far from a benign doctrine. Rather, it is at complete enmity with Christianity, Lukacs pointed out during the virtual in Truth Over Fear Summit organized by California-based Catholic writer and broadcaster Patrick Coffin.

Transhumanists take science as their religion and believe in a philosophy of absolute relativism that claims that individuals can change reality at will, and they seek to relativize the human being and turn it into a putty that can be modified or molded to our taste and our desire and by rejecting those limits nature or God have placed on us.

Transhumanism therefore requires the destruction of the Judeo-Christian morality, which is based on absolute principles and values.

Those raising alarm about the Great Reset often overlook the crucial role of technology in the plans of the meta-capitalists, contended Lukacs, who has Ph.D. in management from the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR) from the University of Manchester.

The COVID-19 pandemic was just another social engineering project deliberately planned and implemented by predatory meta capitalism to achieve the ultimate end: redefining and reconfiguring the human nature and condition, he argued in a presentation in Spanish.

I have the firm conviction that this pandemic has been manufactured and its purpose is none other than to initiate, as they say, or implement the Great Reset, which will open the door to the advancement of the transhumanist agenda, he said.

Indeed, WEFs Schwab has been promoting the Great Reset as a way to harness the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a term he coined, which, he declared in January 2016, will affect the very essence of our human experience.

Schwab described the Fourth Industrial Revolution then as a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines among the physical, digital and biological spheres, Lukacs said.

Those technologies include genetic engineering such as CRISPR genetic editing, artificial intelligence (A.I.), robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, and quantum computing.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is nothing other than the implementation of transhumanism on a global level, emphasized Lukacs.

Transhumanism as a political ideology and cultural movement was defined in 1998 by Swedish economist Nick Bostrom, then a professor at Oxford, and David Pearce, a British philosopher, who that year founded the World Transhumanist Association.

More recently, Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and author of Homo Deus, who is regarded as a great visionary, has been promoting transhumanism.

Transhumanists propose to use technology to alter human nature to produce human beings with super longevity, super intelligence, super well-being, Lukacs said.

They reject the Christian belief in absolute truth, and that God created human person in His image and likeness, and see absolute values as a brake for their pretensions of transhumanist and globalist progressivism.

Thats why the approval of abortion is key to understanding why we are entering fully into this transhumanist agenda of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Lukacs said.

When abortion was approved, the political, economic order and moral values on which Western civilization is based collapsed.

Abortion means nothing other than the transition of the human being from a subject of rights to an object of commercialization, to an object of experimentation, he said.

Life ceases to have an inherent value, an inherent dignity. It becomes an object of consumption, an object of production, and this aligns perfectly with the goal of transhumanists to experiment with the human being.

Transhumanism is a struggle against those propositions of absolute values, said Lukacs, and what it embodies in progressivism is absolute relativism.

Evidence that absolute relativism has caught hold in the Western world is the rapid and widespread rise in trangenderism.

Lukacs also noted cases of transspecisim, transageism, transableism, and transracism.

Examples of these attempts to reshape ones reality at will include the American known as Lizard Man, the Canadian man living as a six-year-old, the British woman who blinded herself because she wanted to be disabled, and the German woman who injected herself with melatonin to darken her skin to identify as black.

These are previous states of transhumanism, a kind of accustoming, especially of the new generations, to accept this diversity, Lukacs said.

While many transhumanist proposals are rooted in science fiction, Lukacs pointed out they now have the technology to attempt to realize their mad aspirations.

Transhumanists propose to increase longevity by using CRISPR genetic editing, which has been used to triple the lifespan of mice. Thus, using this technique on human beings, it is conceivable that people could live to the age of 200 or 300 years old, he said.

They propose to increase human intelligence by planting chips in people that have greater processing capacity than the human brain.

An example is Elon Musks NeuraLink, which is an interface that is applied to the cerebral cortex and which Musk says will help people with Alzheimers or epilepsy, but which Lukacs speculates could open the door to neuro-hackers.

There is also the post-humanist school of transhumanism, of which economist Bostrom is a proponent.

Bostrom proposes that at some point it will not even be necessary to have a physical body, but we will be a set of information, that we will be able to upload our thoughts to the Cloud, that we will be able to form a great collective intelligence with other human beings, Lukac said.

As for the promise of super wellbeing, philosopher Pearce said it was the hedonist imperative to genetically modify us to aspire to super well-being.

What Pearce is saying is that through genetic modification, were going to be virtuous human beings, and that we have to forget about pain and suffering, we have to get rid of those genes that make us aggressive, violent, jealous, that force us to fight and kill each other, said Lukacs.

When you put all these things into the balance, what you are realizing is what you are looking at is literally the destruction of human beings, of Homo sapiens, and their conversion to Homo deus.

But as with the Great Reset, the elites twist the language and disguise their transhumanist agenda behind vaguely benign phrases, so Schwabs Fourth Industrial Revolution is sold to us as an idea thats not necessarily going to affect us, or that it is progress that will benefit humanity, he said.

However, just as ordinary people will suffer in the Great Reset under the architecture of oppression, as Edward Snowden phrased it, so they will bear the brunt of the experimentation by transhumanists.

Its very worrying because for achieving that kind of dream, many, many mistakes will happen for sure. The burden will be carried by the people that get affected by this in their health, in their lives, in their economic situation and in their psychological or mental state, said Lukacs.

Its a very, very costly experiment. And [the elites] are not going to bear any responsibility for this. Trust me, he told Coffin.

For them, its wonderful. For the rest, this is just dystopian.

Lukacs also contended that the global elites encountered an unexpected roadblock to their plans in U.S. president Donald Trump.

Actually, the structure of power is not that complicated, he told Coffin in an online Q&A session.

At the top are the meta-capitalists or capitalists that have so much financial muscle that they can play beyond the rules of capitalism; actually, they make the rules of capitalism or remake them, he said.

And you have those guys on Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Finance, Big Construction, everything big, the big corporate transnational world. Those are the billionaires who through their philanthropies, their billion-dollar pledges and all this kind of stuff, they funnel money downwards to all the politicians, who are basically rented politicians, they rent them, they run the world for them, he said.

Its really the privatization of power through philanthropy, added Lukacs.

And then, of course, you will have a layer of middle ground or middle level institutions, NGOs, universities, foundations, and then youll go down to grassroots local government. Its a pyramidal structure.

But Trump is one key public figure who could evidently not be rented.

It is so obvious that in the States right now for the past, what, four, five months, a state coup has been in the making. As simple as that. I have no problem in saying it openly, Lukacs told Coffin.

Thats the situation. They have tried to oust a president that was democratically elected because they are desperate. China is still progressing. And their partners in the West, theyre just not catching up. So, they are a little bit desperate. China is not going to wait.

For more information on Truth Over Fear Summit, go here. Premium passes are still available.

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Far-right polemicist ric Zemmour has vowed to reverse the immigration he blames for undermining Frances identity and core values if he wins the countrys upcoming presidential election. FRANCE 24 spoke to his supporters who gathered by the thousands in Paris on Sunday.

A writer and talk show pundit known for his polarising attacks on Muslims and immigrants, Zemmour emerged as the elections dark horse early on in the campaign, drawing from both the mainstream conservative camp and voters disappointed by the far rights traditional champion, Marine Le Pen. He has since slipped down the table in voter surveys, polling at around 10-11 percent, though his supporters still rank among the most raucous and motivated ahead of the first round of the election on April 10.

On Sunday, tens of thousands gathered at the Trocadro in Paris, facing the Eiffel Tower, hoping to inject new momentum into his campaign. They included veteran far-rightists, staunch Catholics, anti-LGBT activists and anti-vaxxers for whom Zemmour is the best candidate to halt immigration, restore order and uphold traditional French values.

Donning a Zemmour 2022 cap and a baptism medal wrapped around her neck, 18-year-old Eugnie is getting ready to cast her very first ballot on April 10 and she could hardly be more thrilled about her choice of candidate. I never thought Id support someone with such fervour, she says. Im lucky to be casting my first vote for a candidate I really like. The philosophy student was just 9 years oldwhen she first took part in a Paris rally, back in 2013, to oppose marriage for same-sex couples. Nine years on, shes back on the streets of the French capital to prove that Zemmour is not alone, contrary to what the media claim.

A practising Catholic, Eugnie stresses the former pundits love of France (...) and the fact that hes the only candidate to defend Christian values. Hes also the only one to challenge the transhumanist movement [advocates of human-enhancement technologies], she argues, praising Zemmours conservative stance on bioethical debates that undermine society. While she acknowledges that transhumanism is a niche concern, even for the far-right candidate, Eugnie wholeheartedly subscribes to his core policy: his pledge to halt, and indeed reverse, immigration.

Its good to be humane and welcoming towards foreigners, but when there is a refusal to assimilate we cannot surrender our culture, says the young Zemmouriste, whose champion has called for a ban on non-French first names. Eugnie is aware that Zemmour has slipped behind his rivals in the race for the all-important runoff. But she already has a Plan B in the other far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, who is polling in second place behind the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron.

I live nearby, its a nice day, Ive come to gauge the atmosphere, says 57-year-old Marc, observing the raucous crowd gathered on the Trocadro. An anti-vaxxer and opponent of the Covid-19 health pass, he describes himself as the familys ugly duckling. I didnt get the Covid jab, unlike my mother and brother who sold out to Macron, he says. Born to a French mother and Yugoslav father, Marc says he can identify with Zemmour, whose parents left their native Algeria when it was still a French territory. In fact, he claims lots of people of immigrant background can relate to Zemmour.

Like the far-right candidate, Marc says he is most concerned about the so-called great replacement, a conspiracy theory purporting that white Europeans are being replaced by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, with the complicity of political elites. Its not just a theory, its everywhere, says the self-employed part-time worker in the building industry, pointing to the growing number of women wearing (Muslim) veils in Paris and its suburbs. Aside from immigration, Marc also agrees with Zemmours stances on education and his opposition to woke ideas. Finally, we have a candidate who challenges all the anti-racist, feminist and LGBT talk we are constantly fed by the media, he says.

>> Read more:Pushing far-right agenda, French news networks shape election debate

Portuguese-born but very well assimilated, like Zemmour wants, 53-year-old Ana is perfectly at ease with Zemmours hardline stance on immigration. All of my children have French names, its important for them to integrate, says the mother of four, who travelled from Bellme in Normandy to attend the rally in Paris. A longtime Zemmour fan, Ana was first drawn to the far-right pundit by his televised appearances back in the 1990s and has read every one of his books. Shes a regular participant at his rallies, when she isnt busy running the kitchen of her restaurant.

A devout Catholic, Ana voted for conservative candidate Franois Fillon in 2017. Five years on, she sees Zemmour as the champion of Christian values. Hes the only one with a plan to save our civilisation from the great replacement. Our race is in decline and were heading for catastrophe, she says, describing Zemmour as an opportunity for France. Ana is convinced the former pundit would have averted the war in Ukraine had he been in power. He would have known how to negotiate with Putin because he is a man of peace, she says of Zemmour, who has frequently praised the Russian president, once saying he longed for a French Putin.

Another longtime supporter, Florent signed up for Zemmours fledgling party Reconqute ! at the first opportunity. I like his ideas, his personality and his background too. Hes the only one to cast a lucid eye on the situation, particularly when it comes to immigration, says the 40-year-old school supervisor from the leafy Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, for whom the great replacement is well underway.

When you see the number of veiled women increasing in a wealthy town like Saint-Cloud, where I live, it means immigration is everywhere, he claims. What will the country look like in 20 years? We must act now. Florent is also drawn to Zemmours education platform, with its focus on discipline. Every day I see kids falling by the wayside. We must restore order to the system, he says. However, Florent is increasingly pessimistic about his candidates chances of qualifying for the run-off. If he fails, he will vote for Le Pen, without a doubt as he has done in the past. Everything must be done to get rid of Macron, he adds.

A one-time Le Pen supporter, 42-year-old Sverine recently switched her allegiance to Zemmour, angered by Le Pens jabs at the former pundit. I didnt like it when Le Pen branded him far right, she says. And when she had a go at him for having Nazis in his party, it was really absurd, because she has the very same problem. An administrative workerin a suburb of Paris, Sverinesays she leans neither right nor left and is drawn to Zemmours earnest talk. Hes not a politician, hes a man of the people, like a family friend, she says of the hardline polemicist, who has two convictions for hate speech and is appealing a third.

While she does not live in the countryside, Sverine approves of Zemmours promise to hand struggling rural families a 10,000cheque. She also backs him to halt the decline in Frances education system. Holding up a banner that reads Women with Zemmour, she dismisses the accusations of misogyny levelled at the far-right candidate, who has repeatedly blasted feminist campaigns and attempts to introduce gender parity in government. Such accusations are totally unfounded, she claims. I even get the impression there are more women than men at his rallies.

This article was adapted from the original in French.

Link:
Spooked by immigration, Islam and woke ideas: Who are ric Zemmours supporters? - FRANCE 24 English

In his writings on Fatima and Russia, the Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen pointed out that the world has become so used to judging temporal events in terms of other events, that it has lost sight of that greater standard of judgment, namely, the Eternal. Michael Warren Davis, in an article forCrisis, has recently accused another archbishop, Carlo Maria Vigan, of having fallen into precisely this error, becoming so absorbed in worldly events, so swept away by trends in modern politics, that he has let the clamor of current events drown outthe voice of God, and blind him to the evils of the Russian government.

I strongly disagree. In fact, if we look at Vigans writings in the light of Sheens discussion of Fatima, we can see that just the opposite is true. Far from Vigan being the one drowning out the voice of God, it is actually the entire Western world that is guilty of drowning out not only the voice of God but even the very clear signs of His intervention in and movement through world events.

To understand this, we must step back and address what Mary meant when she spoke of Russias errors. The most common interpretation is that she was referring to the errors of communism. But there are several reasons to reject this interpretation. First, she spoke of these errors in her July appearance, months before the communists took over. The February Revolution had been a bourgeois democratic one that ended what had previously been seen as the divinely-appointed Tsarist monarchy. If Mary meant the errors of communism, why appear before the communists took over? Why appear when those at the time would have thought she was referring to the democratic revolution?

Further, communism was not newly spawned in Russia in 1917. By that time, it had been spreading its errors across Europe and the world for more than 70 years, and the Church had been sounding the alarm about it throughout those years. Neither it nor its spread were new to Russia. Third, if Mary meant communism, why not just say communism or communist errors? Why just errors?

Sheen points us in a different directionspecifically, to the year 1858. He asks us to look not only at the world events of that year but at the Eternal ones as well. Rejecting the commonly held view that the Modern Age started with the rise of science, something that is not at odds with Faith, he argues that it began instead with the writing of three seminal works: Darwins On the Origins of Species, Mills On Liberty, and Marxs A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In those three works, Man summarized the errors of the Modern Age and announced his independence from God: we were not divinely created but rather evolved from mere matter; there is no higher authority than man to which we must answer, freedom is license, the only laws are those we choose to make; and Man and history are driven by economics and politics not religion and certainly not anything spiritual.

These are not the errors of communism. They are the errors of modernism. They are errors that have to do with Modern Mans denial of God, of Creation, of Gods Authority over Man, of any obedience due to Him. Sheen points out that what was effectively said in those works, in that year of 1858, was that all men are immaculately conceived, all born without Original Sin. For if there was no Divine Creation, then there was no Fall. No Fall, no Original Sin. If there is no Original Sin, then all men are born immaculate and free to be whatever they want to be, answerable to and in need of no higher authority.

Those were the key human events of 1858 to which Sheen directs us. He then shifts our attention to Gods response, His Eternal judgment, that occurred that very same year: the Apparitions at Lourdes. Mary appeared from Heaven and announced: I am the Immaculate Conception. Sheen points out that at the very moment the world was denying original sin, our Blessed Mother claimed the prerogative solely as her ownshe alone and uniquely was immaculately conceivedeveryone else was born in original sin.

In the Blessed Mothers appearance at Lourdes, Sheen notes, God answered Mans arrogant claim of independence and provided proof of his errors. Her very appearance said yes, there is more than matter; yes, there is a God; yes, there is a Heaven; yes, Man was born in Original Sin; and yes, Man owes obedience to God and reparations for the sins committed against Him. Every error contained in those three seminal works was contradicted in that one announcement: I am the Immaculate Conception.

Thus, Sheen says, began the Modern Agenot with science and reason, but with the denial of Original Sin and Gods response.

But Man did not take notice of, nor heed, that Eternal pronouncement, that Eternal judgment.

Instead, the modernist errors continued to be spread throughout Europe, along with all the other errors that went hand in hand with them: rationalism, socialism, communism, and all the others Pope Pius IX listed in Quanta Cura and its attached Syllabus of Errors. But that was in 1864. By 1917, those errors had existed and been spreading for another 50-plus years before the Russian Revolution and Marys appearance at Fatima. They were unique neither to Russia nor to communism. So, what was different about Russia that Mary would single it out?

The answer can be found in the pages of Pope Leo XIIIs Rerum Novarum. In it, he gives the Churchs answer to communism: inequality and class conflict are not aberrations to be fixed, but rather they are a part of the human condition. Mankind lives in a fallen world, a world felled by mans disobedience to God. Only through God and with God, through His Church, will peace and harmony be possible. All the sects, organizations, societies, fraternities, all the governmental solutions that communists and socialists think able to fix the world are futile and delusional. No organization or State, apart from God, will ever be able to bring peace to the world. Social problems cannot be solved apart from God and His Church.

If we look to all the writings of the Church throughout this time, what we see is increasing concern not just over the errors themselves but over the increasing belief that man could fix the human condition through the creation of a godless State, through the implementation of mere economic and political change. And that is what was new in Russia, in the February Revolution and to be completed in the Bolshevik one: the successful creation of a political body that incorporated all those errorsa secular State that, apart from any reference at all to God, claimed to be able to solve the problems inherent in the human condition; a State that said no to God, no to any authority higher than itself, no to natural law; and a State that would be powerful enough to spread those errors across the world. As Sheen put it, Russia gave political form and social substance to the de-spiritualization of the Western world.

The danger in believing Mary was pointing specifically to communism and to Russia lay in believing the problem is Russia and the error communism, when in fact the error is believing that man is nothing more than a rational animal who can fix all his social problems through the political and economic policies enacted by a secular State.

When Mary appeared at Fatima, her first announcement was this: I am from Heaven. As God responded to Mankinds announcement of its separation from Him in 1858, so He responded in 1917 to its erection of a godless State as the new path to human happiness and freedom: Mary stepped into time and announced that Heaven exists. And if Heaven exists, then there is a higher authority. Salvation and redemption will not come from a man-made State but from God and only from God. And to prove this, to drive the message home, Mary would appear six times. And on the last one, she would bring direct proof from Heaven, a miracle that would prove the lie that man is the highest authority on earth and fully capable of fixing that earth as he alone wills it to be fixed.

But even with a miracle witnessed by tens of thousands, Modern Man again said no and did not heed the message.

And the Soviet State grew and did indeed spread its errors across the world. Not the errors of communism, but rather the modernist errors that man is independent and can create his own path to utopia by means of the secular State. Throughout the West, in country after country, man began to turn to the government, the State, to solve more and more of his social problems. Care of the poor shifted to the State. Mediation of class conflict shifted to the State. Alleviation of discrimination, racial conflicts, income inequality: all shifted to the State. Individual charity was replaced by State-run charity.

Even the Church turned to the State to solve societys problems, mans human condition, and she shifted her focus to influencing public policy. Every social problem came to be seen as fixable through a new State policy, a new institutional or systemic change. It was only a matter of time until they were also seen as the result of poor government policy, not a wound in mans human nature. Everything was fixable through the State, not by healing hearts and souls through grace attained through the Church God created to heal mens souls.

Sheen drives home the point again and again that the errors were not specific to Russia or communism. They caught fire in capitalist countries as easily as they did in communist ones. He notes that there is a closer relation between communism and monopolistic capitalism than most minds suspect. They are agreed on the materialistic basis of civilization; they disagree only on who shall control that basis, capitalists or bureaucrats. And further, he says: Capitalistic economy is godless; communism makes economics God. Capitalism denies that economics is subject to a higher moral order. Communism says that economics is morality.

In fact, he highlights how the Church is as opposed to monopoly capitalism as it is to communism. The errors permeate both. Both reduce man to a mere economic animal. Both use the State to rule.

The issue isnt Vigan being blind to the evils of the Russian government. It is the West that is blind to the evils that have permeated its own existence to its very core. It is the modernist Church that is blind to the evils of thinking it right to replace sacraments with social action, taking government money to feed bellies at the expense of feeding souls.

Vigan looks at the WEF, the IMF, the UN, NATO, the EU, and all the other associations that have risen in the West and sees them not in terms of other worldly events but in terms of the Eternal. He sees them as Pope Leo XIII saw the secular associations of his day: efforts by man to fix the world apart from God and His Church.

He sees, too, that what they are trying to do is create a new, even more powerful State than the Russian one Mary warned us about, a Global State with the declared goal of creating a New World Order and a new transhuman creature. Modernism stripped man of his spiritual nature. Transhumanism seeks to strip him of his most basic human nature, reducing him to a mere machine, perfected by technology and microbiology.

Vigan has not become absorbed with politics. He has become absorbed with the Eternal, with seeing the Eternal in the affairs of the day, including both those things God seems to be moving as well as those things Satan seems to be moving. We dont know if the Consecration occurred as Mary asked, but Vigan asks us to look at world events not just in terms of other world events, but in terms of spiritual events. What we do know is that the Soviet State collapsed in 1989. And we know that since that time, Russia has been undergoing a Re-Christianization while the entire Western world has been experiencing its De-Christianization.

Vigan asks us to see that it isnt really Russia, or communism, or capitalism that we are battling but rather the Principalities, the Satanic forces that seek to enslave all men to a godless Global State. He asks us to consider that God is giving Russiare-Christianizing Russiathe chance to atone for its sins by being the very thing that prevents that Global State from being created.

And is that so hard to imagine? Is it not just like our God? To let Russia atone for its sins and be the means of saving many souls?

And is this not also just like Our God: To once again respond to mans rejection by guiding us to Him and Our Blessed Mother Mary? Is it not just like Him that, on the Marian feast day of the Annunciation of Gods Incarnation, the most modernist pope in the history of the Church got down on his knees and called the entire world, East and West, to likewise fall to its knees, every bishop, all people, on our knees, and not just recognize, finally, the Immaculate Conception, but moreto consecrate ourselves, and our entire world, to her Immaculate Heart, the Immaculate Heart of the Immaculate Conception, thereby saying, at last, after all these years, after all these appearances, finally: yes, there is a God; yes, there is a Heaven; yes, we are more than mere matter; yes, we are all sinners; and yes, we must obey God and make reparations for our sins.

In turning our eyes and our hearts to Mary, are we not finally conceding, agreeing with Pope Leo XIII, that apart from God, there will be no peace? Apart from God, no merely human institution, no godless Stateno matter how big, how globalis going to save us.

And is that not just like our God? The most modernist pope of all timeleading the world to renounce the most fundamental errors of modernism?

Is it not a fitting way for the Eternal to announce the end of the Modern Age?

At just that moment when man cant even define what a woman is, God reminds us that it is to a woman that He has given the power of overcoming evil, a woman who will crush the head of the Serpent. Modern Man lost Jesus. His Mother has returned to help us find Him. She has experience in that.

View original post here:
Mary, the West, and Russia's Errors: A Defense of Archbishop Vigan - Crisis Magazine

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat in the sun, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

How People Think 17 of the most common and influential aspects of how people think Many behaviors are universal across generations and geographies. Circumstances change, but peoples reactions dont. Technologies evolve, but insecurities, blind spots, and gullibility rarely does. (Collaborative Fund)

The Latecomers Guide to Crypto As its gone mainstream, crypto has inspired an unusually polarized discourse. Its biggest fans think its saving the world, while its biggest skeptics are convinced its all a scam an environment-killing speculative bubble orchestrated by grifters and sold to greedy dupes, which will probably crash the economy when it bursts.(New York Times)

The Art of Money: Turning financial success into a creative pursuit What do you consider the act of making money? Is it an act of accounting and measuring? Or, is it an act of imagining and contemplating? Our finances involve numbers and data, but theyre intractably tied to our personal ideas, experiences, feelings and behaviors intangible things you cant formulate in a spreadsheet. Therefore, to manage the human side of money, its better to think more like an artist than a scientist. (The Root of All)

Why Cant the West Admit That Ukraine Is Winning? America has become too accustomed to thinking of its side as stymied, ineffective, or incompetent. (The Atlantic)

Silicon Valleys Favorite Weird Philosophy Is Fundamentally Wrong: Where transhumanists err is in the disproportionate role assigned to genes in creating their favored traits. In contrast to clear-cut physical features, such as eye color, the relationship of genetic information to characteristics such as intelligence and kindness is nuanced and indirect. Today, developmental systems theory supersedes the dominant, unidirectional causality previously lodged with genes. (Slate)

Why Do We Die Without Sleep? The reasons why sleep is so vital often hide in unexpected parts of the body, as host Steven Strogatz discovers in conversations with researchers Dragana Rogulja and Alex Keene. (Quanta Magazine)

Heres how an algorithm guides a medical decision Artificial intelligence tools are complicated computer programs that suck in vast amounts of data, search for patterns or trajectories, and make a prediction or recommendation to help guide a decision. Sometimes, the way algorithms process all of the information theyre taking in is a black box inscrutable even to the people who designed the program. But even if a program isnt a black box, the math can be so complex that its difficult for anyone who isnt a data scientist to understand exactly whats going on inside of it. (The Verge)

In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things: The truth is new and counterintuitive: we have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels. (New Yorker)

Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album: Combing across 19th-century shores, seaweed collectors would wander for hours, tucking specimens into pouches and jars, before pasting their finds into artful albums. Sasha Archibald explores the eros contained in the pressed and illustrated pages of notable algologists, including the most ambitious album of all by Charles F. Durant (Public Domain Review)

Demand for This Toads Psychedelic Venom Is Booming. Some Warn Thats Bad for the Toad. In a sign of unintended consequences of the psychedelic resurgence, scientists say that the Sonoran desert toad is at risk of population collapse. (New York Times)

Be sure to check out ourMasters in Businessinterview this weekend with Samara Cohen, BlackRocks Chief Investment Officer for ETFs & Index Investments. BlackRock manages over $10 trillion in assets, and Cohens Index / ETF group is responsible for $6 trillion of it.

Geopolitical events. The playbook worked (nearly) perfectlySource: Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank

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10 Weekend Reads - The Big Picture - Barry Ritholtz

DNA Tracing

This article first appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 362 in October 2021, as part of our 'DNA Tracing' series, where every month we delve into the lineages behind iconic games and studios.

The life of a studio famed for big, difficult decisions began with a no-brainer. When John Romero approached Warren Spector with a blank cheque to make his dream game, Spector's team was unemployedshowing up to the defunct Looking Glass Austin office to pitch ideas unpaid. In their sketches and documents was a concept for a spy game called Shooter, in which an agent could hack devices and control nanotechnology. The year was 1997, and the air was thick with Hollywood actors in mirrored sunglasses tapping away at chunky keyboards.

Suddenly, with Romero's backing, anything Spector and his studio could imagine was fair game. The fundamentals were clear for a team that had coalesced around Thief: The Dark Projecta first-person world in which objects behaved as expected when subjected to gravity and the elements, and NPCs reacted with a nuance that enabled players to manipulate them.

Yet it wouldn't be true to say that Deus Ex was born from a unified creative vision. In fact, Spector encouraged discord by creating two design teams, each with a separate idea of what the game should be. One, headed up by future Arkane boss Harvey Smith, was determined to ground the adventure in a fashion that emphasised the 'near-' of near-future; the other had inherited the Ultima RPG sensibilities of Spector's alma mater, Origin Systems.

The results could have been disastrous, a game pulled apart by horses. Instead, Deus Ex was elevated by its whiplash variety. One level, which Smith fought to keep free of enemies, was a prototypical Gone Home in which you quietly explored the mansion of a dead Illuminati leader, listening to the wistful observations of the daughter she left behind. Another was a Matrix-esque hotel escape best handled with a flamethrower. A third, Hong Kong, was a massive city hub stuffed with engrossing dialoguea no-no in Looking Glass games, which had favoured abandoned or out-of-hours spaces in order to dodge uncanny NPCs. Forget Assassin's Creed, Deus Ex was the game in which everything was permitted, for player and developer both.

That exhilarating clash of contrasts was reflected in the story, too. Where later sequels homed in on transhumanism and the social issues it magnified, the original Deus Ex was an explosion of conflicting political ideas. Through likeable secondary characters, who condemned lethal methods in no uncertain terms, it endorsed a broadly liberal worldview. Yet its knotted storyline also warned against the potential of globalism to put power in the hands of a malevolent few, and hooked you up with a terrorist group dedicated to upholding the US right to bear arms. Thanks to the earnest socialist voice of lead writer Sheldon Pacotti, Deus Ex became a game in which a minor NPC in a bar could bend your ear with a radical interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. Like the environment it was produced in, Deus Ex was a smorgasbord of ideologies.

By the time it came to make Deus Ex: Invisible War, Ion Storm Austin had resolved its internal differences. Perhaps that was part of the problem. With Harvey Smith newly installed as creative director, the team set about streamlining, determined to focus Deus Ex's feature set. Some of the more notorious controversies now seem overblownthe universal ammo system is defensible, for instance, since it regularly drains your guns, encouraging creative solutions with an environmental or social dimension instead. But Invisible War's amalgamated factions decoupled the series from real-world concerns. What's more, a singular vision reduced Invisible War's capacity for surprise, even as it routinely matched its predecessor for thoughtful, non-linear level design.

The biggest issue, however, was the Xbox. It's important to note that, in 2021, the tribal fear of 'dumbing down' is outdated hogwash; practically every AAA game is now multi-platform, a trend which has multiplied game budgets, benefitting PC gamers just like everyone else. Invisible War, however, fell on the edge of that change. The Xbox's 64mb of RAM forced a dramatic reduction in the scale of Deus Ex's levels.

While not necessarily a dealbreaker for designimmersive sims have always favoured density over sprawlit was a compromise that hurt Invisible War's fiction. Lower Seattle, supposedly a sprawling slum, comprised a couple of tight streets, three apartments, one coffee shop and a deathly quiet barfar from the "vast cityscape" described in early interviews.

Ion Storm pursued a similar policy of parallel development on PC and Xbox for its third and final project, Thief: Deadly Shadows. And some of the same problems manifestedespecially in the cramped open world that connected missions, damaging the carefully curated sense of a larger city looming in the background of Garrett's heists. Yet it clearly benefitted from being second in the queue, behind Invisible Warbearing less of the brunt of the console's technological lessons.

In fact, with Deadly Shadows, it finally seemed as if advancing tech was catching up with the Looking Glass dream of a simulation that mimicked the world's natural forces. The Havok physics was rubbery but robust, and Ion Storm made fine use of dynamic shadowsmaking your safe space mercurial for the first time as torch-wielding patrols moved back and forth behind lampposts.

Most of all, Deadly Shadows felt like the completion of a circle for the studio that had first coalesced around Thief. Spector let former Looking Glass staff lead the way, who treated Deadly Shadows as the last part in a trilogytying off Garrett's journey from cynic and misanthrope to caretaker of the world. Rarely has an inherited series been honoured so carefully.

Ironically enough, it's a reverence Ion Storm would never have afforded its own series, Deus Ex, which it considered a platform for risk-taking. That impetus might have disappointed players of Invisible War, who found their beloved RPG-shooter too much changed. But without that same quality, they would never have cared about the name Deus Ex in the first place.

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Ion Storm Austin's journey from Thief to Thief, by way of Deus Ex - PC Gamer